Marcus felt the blood drain from his face as he read it. His application essay, "The Architecture of the Soul," was displayed in the college's online newsletter. He felt like he was falling.

The world seemed to tilt. He clenched his fists until his knuckles were white. He took several deep breaths, trying to steady himself, and failing.

He sat back in his chair, trying to ground himself. His eyes darted around the room, searching for something to focus on. But he found nothing.

Emotion: overwhelmed

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.52 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.94

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion overwhelmed. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 overwhelmed stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the overwhelmed emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the overwhelmed vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
S0.385
😫0.332
😖0.319
😣0.319
😩0.314
Suppressed:
la-0.576
de-0.496
a-0.297
happy-0.290
l-0.264